Re: [Sks-devel] Big amount of updated keys yesterday?

[Jeff Johnson]

On Apr 12, 2011, at 4:21 AM, Sebastian Wiesinger wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> yesterday I noticed that my SKS Server was constantly updating it's
> key database for over an hour. This also showed in the stats:
> 
> Daily Histogram
> Time    New Keys        Updated Keys
> 2011-04-12      74      65
> 2011-04-11      365     7678
> 2011-04-10      280     137
> 
> 
> Hourly Histogram
> Time    New Keys        Updated Keys
> 2011-04-12 02   13      8
> 2011-04-12 01   15      6
> 2011-04-12 00   46      51
> 2011-04-11 23   15      5
> 2011-04-11 22   15      5
> 2011-04-11 21   62      3419
> 2011-04-11 20   2       3597
> 2011-04-11 19   9       505
> 2011-04-11 18   19      18
> 
> Does anyone know what happened yesterday and where the updates came
> from?
> 
> Also this took over an hour and almost exclusively used all the I/O to
> the disks in the system. Is there a way to increase the performance
> for updates in the key db?
> 

AFAICT this was pretty close to the beginning of this thread.

This message is also (afiact) the closest thing to a problem report with

        almost exclusively used all the I/O to the disks

Is there really a problem here?

An update of 5000-1000 keys over 2-3 hours isn't wildly out of line
with the statistics I've seen.

Key servers come and go, and when there's a diconnection of some sort,
then there can be a burst of activity when the disconnection repairs itself.

That is the nature of gossip proptocols.

Is there a real problem here? What is the problem?

Even if there is a problem, there's no easy way to remove content
from SKS key servers once data has been entered. That was discussed
a while back in the context of removing a single problematic key
that escalated to a legal obligation to remove a user's personal
details from a specfific host.


So what is the problem here? Exchanging logs and doing forensics on
a gossiping set of servers is likely going to be difficult, just
see the snarls and loops being reported already.

Sure its an interesting challenge to try and find a "smoking gun".

But habeas corpus applies: What problem exists?

73 de jeff

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